Voices used for scams and consumers with/without AI

FAKE VOICES

Artificial Intelligence allows bad guys to learn someone's voice and vocal patterns and then manipulate it to scam people. Thomas Brewster has said "Once a technology confined to the realm of fictional capers like Mission: Impossible, voice cloning is now widely available." This scam is too new to have an official name yet. I have seen it referred to with all these terms:

Voice fraud
Voice phishing or the shortened version: vishing
Voice cloning
Voice swapping
Artificial voice
AI voice cloning and A.I.-generated audio
Synthetic Audio and Deepfake Audio and Audio Deepfakes
Deep Voice, and the generic, DeepFake

IMPROVING TECH

January 9, 2023. It is bad enough that, when we get a phone call, the callerid can be faked. Now, faking the voice is getting better and easier. Microsoft's new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio by Benj Edwards for Ars Technica. It claimed that this new system can preserve the speaker's emotional tone and acoustic environment. Quoting: "Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person's voice when given a three-second audio sample ... VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything - and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone. Unlike other text-to-speech methods ... VALL-E generates discrete audio codec codes from text and acoustic prompts. It basically analyzes how a person sounds, breaks that information into discrete components (called 'tokens') thanks to EnCodec, and uses training data to match what it 'knows' about how that voice would sound if it spoke other phrases outside of the three-second sample.".

SCAMS DONE WITH FAKE VOICES

October 2021: A bank manager in Hong Kong received a call from a man whose voice he thought he recognized and the bank was scammed out of $35 million dollars. Fraudsters Cloned Company Director's Voice In $35 Million Bank Heist, Police Find by Thomas Brewster in Forbes. Manipulating audio is easier to orchestrate than deep fake videos, so expect more in the future.
July 2021: A documentary about Anthony Bourdain includes three scenes with a fake voice. The director admitted to one scene, no one knows what the other two are. The Ethics of a Deepfake Anthony Bourdain Voice by Helen Rosner for The New Yorker
July 2020: Listen to This Deepfake Audio Impersonating a CEO in Brazen Fraud Attempt by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Vice. A security firm analyzed a suspicious voicemail left to a tech company employee, part of an attempt to get the employee to send money to criminals.
August 2019: Fake voices help cyber-crooks steal cash (BBC July 2019). Symantec has seen three cases of faked audio of chief executives used to trick financial controllers into transferring cash. Fraudsters deepfake CEO’s voice to trick manager into transferring $243,000. The original story was reported in the Wall Street Journal.
July 2019: Deepfake Audio Used to Impersonate Senior Executives (CPO Magazine). The attacks seen so far have used background noise to mask imperfections, for example simulating someone calling from a spotty cellular phone connection or being in a busy area with a lot of traffic.

VOICE SCAM DEFENSE

Defending against audio deepfakes before it's too late (Axios April 2019). A review of the state of the art both for creating and detecting fake audio.
How To Spot Deepfake Audio Fraud (Aug. 2019). The quality of the fake voice can be excellent for non-conversational audio, such as a statement. However, it suffers when engaged in a conversation. When in doubt, call the person back.

CONSUMER USES of FAKE VOICES and AI

January 5, 2023. Researcher Deepfakes His Voice, Uses AI to Demand Refund From Wells Fargo by Joseph Cox for Wired. Why stay on the line with the bank for ten, 20, 30 minutes, when an AI-driven bot could waste that time for you? That’s what a new tool from Do Not Pay promises. The founder of Do Not Pay used an AI-generated version of his own voice to overturn wire fees. Do Not Pay, which has automated a ton of menial tasks, says it plans to make the tool available to customers.
December 20, 2022. ChatGPT Can Negotiate Comcast Bills Down For You by Edward Ongweso Jr for Vice. DoNotPay styles itself as a consumer advocate, primarily using templates to help users secure refunds from corporations. There are, however, sharp limits to the viability of that model, so the company has recently been experimenting with AI. Quoting: "Now we can really have conversations with companies and that's dramatically increased our success rate and allowed us to pursue much higher levels of disputes. Now we can negotiate hospital bills, lower utility bills, things where the companies respond and we can chat with them in real time .. That's the future of bureaucracy: bots negotiating with each other..." said Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay.